"Altman" (Epix, Wednesday). Ron Mann, the director of the documentaries "Twist" and "Comic Book Confidential," has made a movie about Robert Altman. There is no American director working in my lifetime whose work has meant more to me than Altman, and not just the big, accepted successes like "MASH," "The Player" and "Gosford Park," but also "Brewster McCloud, "Buffalo Bill and the Indians" and "Prêt-à-Porter" and "A Prairie Home Companion," films full of life and a love for humankind in its sometimes horrifying, but always wonderful, variety. Ten years ago, on the occasion of an election-year rebroadcast of his groundbreaking, life-meets-art mockumentary HBO series "Tanner '88," I wrote of him, "In spite of the occasional unexpected crossover hit, Altman is the least accommodating of American filmmakers, with an abiding disinterest in popular notions of clarity and narrative, image and sound. Instead, with his long lenses and overlapping dialog, he makes little symphonies of chaos, teeming with incident -- the film equivalent of a Brueghel painting." That is, his work was lifelike, and made in the service of life; endings were almost incidental -- something new may be starting at the right of the frame while something old is concluding at the left.

The young maestro was coming. Something special was hanging in the air.
And so the fans, thousands of them, squeezed into the stands around the 18th hole at Royal Liverpool on Saturday afternoon. They knew they needed to be there, to embrace it, to be...

The Baltimore novelist and short story writer Stephen Dixon has won a 2014 O. Henry Award for his short story, "Talk."
The annual prize honors 20 of the best short stories each year. Also on this year's list are such well-known national authors as...

The O. Henry Prize announced its 2014 winners Monday. All are short stories that will be included in its upcoming anthology "The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014," to be released in September.
The 20 winning stories come from 14 publications from a variety...

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2nd Story is a collective of story-makers and story-lovers working together to build community through the power of storytelling. They host story-sharing experiences in Chicago and beyond, in the form of both...

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Life in early 1960s America was a weird and wonderful combination of Cold War-era tension and congenial baby boomer Utopia. Our fractious, fun-loving state of mind allowed Pat Boone, Rat Fink, Connie Francis and Alfred Hitchcock to co-exist very comfortably, and a significant chunk of this pop culture was ruled by a horde of aliens and monsters.
On the small screen, no series better captured America’s shadowy side then science fiction anthology “The Outer Limits,” which literally...

The title of Elizabeth Spencer's eighth book of short fiction, "Starting Over," carries a double meaning: It refers both to the characters in the collection and to the author herself. Ninety-two years old, winner of a PEN/Malamud Award and five O. Henry prizes as well as nine novels, she last released a book, "The Southern Women," in 2001.
Spencer, however, has been far from inactive, publishing in literary journals and seeing her best-known work, the 1960 novella "The Light in the Piazza," adapted as a...

Good Sunday morning, only three days left ’til Christmas. Still plenty of time to hustle and bustle. But once the holiday arrives and everyone’s all settled in, steal a little time for a story. You already know the classics: “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry, “A Visit From St. Nicholas” by Clement Clarke Moore, “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens. Here are a few more to add to your list. Our first pick comes from Cambridge World Classics’ “50...

O. Henry Photos

Before Patti Smith, before Allen Ginsberg, before Thomas Wolfe, before O. Henry, the Chelsea Hotel was populated by 80 convivial families of various levels of wealth, brought together by an idealistic board partly inspired by a French philosopher so radical some thought him mad.
That was back at the turn of the century — the 20th century — which is where Sherill Tippins begins her engaging, readable history, "Inside the Dream Palace." It tells the story of the remarkable building, opened...

Earlier this week in Boston, I ducked into Raven Used Books on Newbury Street and found a stack of pamphlets, emblazoned with the logo “One City One Story,” in a loose pile by the front door. They were free, a giveaway sponsored by the Boston Book Festival, which takes place in October in Copley Square.
The idea, inspired by the literary journal One Story, is to distribute 30,000 copies of a short story in the weeks leading up to the book festival, where a “Town Hall-style”...

Short version: Why are you reading this, when there’s a new Guy Davenport anthology?
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This piece first ran in Printers Row Journal, delivered to Printers Row members with the Sunday Chicago Tribune and by digital edition via email. Click here to learn about joining Printers Row.
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Longer version: Guy Davenport died in 2005, a victim of chain-smoking, that most writerly of habits. The last piece of his I read before his death was a review of The...